Day 2 at IBM Edge 2014 focused on how clients, Business Partners and IBM are working together to build smarter infrastructures to meet the business challenges discussed on Day 1 (cloud, analytics, mobile and social).

Cloud

Chris O’Connor, @chrisoc_IBM, Vice President of Strategy & Engineering, IBM Cloud & Smarter Infrastructure, spoke about the need to seamlessly extend infrastructures from what organizations own today to what they’ll need in the future. He recommended two approaches:

Cloud-enable existing workloads

Think about ‘cloud first’ for new workloads

The idea is to accelerate time to market and be able to make real time actionable insights. With 70% of enterprises planning to pursue hybrid clouds by 2015, according to a 2013 report by Gartner, a two-pronged approach makes sense.

Andrea Nelson, Director of Storage Marketing at Intel collaborated Gartner’s estimate, saying an estimated 50% of organizations less than 10 years old are putting their IT infrastructures on the cloud today.

Chris spoke about the importance of standards, such as OpenStack, that help organizations quickly assemble Software Defined Systems from components, rather than building clouds a stick at a time. With new development platforms such as IBM’s Code name: BlueMix, organizations can construct enterprise-capable cloud applications faster, without having to deploy a cloud infrastructure.

Analytics

Mike North, Sr. Director of Programming for the National Football League spoke about the importance of speeding up the infrastructure to enable analytics. ‘Time to truth’ is critical for analytics. With faster processing, the NFL is able to look at 100s of potential schedules and choose the one with the best potential outcomes for their constituents. IBM’s Arvind Krishna suggested that traditional analytics is like driving a car by looking at the rear view mirror – You can only see where you’ve been. Predictive analytics helps you see into the future, react faster, and achieve better business results

Social

Maria Winans, @mariawinans, IBM VP of Social Business, spoke about how IBM and other organizations are driving people-centric engagement for new profit channels. She also spoke about the importance of analytics, saying you can’t personalize customer experiences if you can’t do the required analytics. Maria offered 3 suggestions for successful social business initiatives:

Embrace disruption

Build shared value

Protect your brand

Mobile

New mobile applications offer the opportunity to improve customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, as well as generate new revenue. Rapid transformation is happening across industries and geographies. IBM estimates there will be over 1 trillion connected objects and devices by 2015. Mobile applications are enriched by cloud, analytics and social business initiatives.

Storage virtualization and Software Defined Storage

Storage virtualization is the foundation for Software Defined Storage. Virtualization provides an abstraction layer between physical storage and applications that use it. The result is a storage infrastructure that can grow and change without impacting users or applications. Software Defined Storage will be required t manage the vast amounts of data organizations expect to manage in the years ahead.

Snehal Antani from GE Capital spoke about the importance of delivering IT at market speed, and with commercial intensity. He offered a strategy of dealing with important groups of people in the organization:

Collaborators

Cynics

Kings and Queens

Collaborators can accelerate change. Identify your collaborators and put them on a pedestal

Cynics are like Eeore in Winnie-the-Pooh. They’ll tell you why change is hard, and focus on what might go wrong. Ignore your cynics.

Kings and Queens are executives and managers who are eager to be offended. They resist change that may impact their empires. They’re a small, but vocal, group. Don’t give them a megaphone.

Snehal also pointed out that technologists can get distracted by new technology, even if it isn’t essential to simplify or accelerate IT delivery. It’s like yelling, ‘Squirrel!’ to distract dogs, as in the movie, Up. GE Capital has signs that say, ‘No Eeyores’ and ‘No squirrels’.

Bottom line: Infrastructure matters

Can the right infrastructure help you build competitive advantage? Yes, of course. Infrastructure matters.

About the author

Mike Barton is a worldwide storage marketing manager at IBM. Mike is a former IT specialist with Gartner TCO and ITIL certifications. The opinions expressed herein are his own.

[Software Defined Storage (SDS)] is getting a lot of attention lately by press, analysts and technology providers such as IBM, causing organizations large and small to take notice. SDS describes a set of storage access and data management services that can deliver what IT administrators are most interested in these days:

Lower storage costs

Less reliance on specific storage systems

Simplified data and storage management

Improved utilization of existing resources

International Data Corporation (IDC) published a [taxonomy for Software Defined Storage] which defines software-based storage as a storage software stack running on commodity, off-the-shelf computing hardware. SDS should offer a full suite of storage services and federation of the underlying storage to enable data mobility, according to IDC.

The interesting thing is, while the name Software Defined Storage is relatively new, IBM has been delivering technology and client solutions that match the SDS definition for over a decade.

Matching IDC’s definition, [IBM SAN Volume Controller], introduced in 2003, is an x86-based appliance running Linux code, providing federated storage virtualization across heterogeneous storage platforms and enabling advanced storage services. SAN Volume Controller has been proven to scale to multiple petabytes. This core technology is also included in IBM’s midrange Storwize storage systems. To date, over 55,000 SAN Volume Controller and Storwize systems have been shipped worldwide, making IBM one of the most popular business class storage virtualization solutions.

If you can’t attend Edge, look for video interviews with Brian Jeffery, Managing Director of International Technology Group, and Steve Wojtowecz, VP of Storage and Network Management Software Development, on [TheCUBE, by Wikibon], live on Monday, May 19 and afterwards on demand.